In the several years following that childhood experience, I set out on a journey that has been the last 13 years of my life:
🌎 I traveled as a 17 year old speaking little English to move to the United States to pursue my Bachelors and Masters degrees
🤝 I started two non-profit organizations while in college
😃 I landed a dream job at Ashoka (the world’s pioneering organization for social entrepreneurship)
🇺🇳 I consulted for the United Nations and endless other awesome organizations that taught me so much about my life’s work…and
❤️ Met the woman of my dreams, too...
In this journey, I made a mistake that I want to ensure you do not make. Changing the world was so important to me that I sacrificed my wellbeing along the way...
That feeling of giving drop by drop of yourself to your cause until… The bucket is empty.
I started to pay the price 6 years ago when:
❌ Anxiety was not letting me sleep.
❌ My energy was so low that I could barely wake up in the morning.
❌ I could not get my mind to focus, even on projects that I loved.
❌ Depression isolated me from the closest people in my life.
❌ Doctors could not figure out what was wrong with my health time and time again.
❌ I ended up at the hospital, multiple times.
❌ I started to doubt my purpose and these goals I worked so hard for.
Deep down in my intuition, I knew that things could not go on as they were: lost and confused in every category of my life. Even worse, the people in my life didn't understand what I was going through. Most thought I was even better than okay - they thought that I was flourishing and thriving, because my external outcomes were giving them that impression.
Let me share with you something you might already know:
Succeeding at external goals feels AWFUL when you are failing internally.
When all my inner systems were crashing, I didn’t care less whether I was winning an award, being recognized as my graduate school commencement speaker, or working for the organization of my dreams. It was not worth it.